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All revolutionary struggles in the world are aimed at seizing political power and consolidating it. The desperate struggles waged by counter-revolutionaries against revolutionary forces are likewise solely for the sake of maintaining their political power.
[This article is reprinted from Peking Review, Vol. 10, #5, Jan. 27,
1967, pp. 7-9. Thanks are due to the WWW.WENGEWANG.ORG
web site for some of the work done for this posting.]
IN response to the great call of our great leader Chairman Mao, a mighty revolutionary storm in which the proletarian revolutionary rebels are forming a great alliance to struggle to seize power, is sweeping the whole of China and shaking the entire world with the force of an avalanche and the power of a thunderbolt.
The grandest festival of the proletarian revolutionary rebels has arrived! The death knell for all monsters and ghosts has sounded! Let us raise both hands high and cheer enthusiastically: The great alliance of the proletarian revolutionary rebels and their seizure of power from those in authority who are taking the capitalist road are excellent, excellent indeed!
This is a new leap forward in our country‘s great proletarian cultural revolution. This is a great start for the nationwide, all-round class struggle to be unfolded this year.
This is an extremely great pioneering undertaking in the international communist movement, a great event without precedent in mankind‘s history, a great event which has a bearing on the future of the world and the destiny of humanity.
In socialist society and under the dictatorship of the proletariat, hundreds of millions of revolutionary people have formed a mighty revolutionary force, with the great alliance of the proletarian revolutionary rebels as the core, to seize power from below, from the handful of people within the Party who are in authority and taking the capitalist road and from those diehards who persistently cling to the bourgeois reactionary line. This is an important development by Chairman Mao of the Marxist-Leninist theory of proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The basic question of revolution is political power. With the victory of the people‘s democratic revolution of our country, the proletariat seized power on a nationwide scale. But the overthrown class enemies remain and they are not reconciled to their defeat. And new bourgeois elements appear in the ranks of the proletariat and the small producers. The struggle for the seizure of power has continued vigorously all the time between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Right from the beginning, the great proletarian cultural revolution has been a struggle for the seizure of power. This great cultural revolution means precisely the arousing of hundreds of millions of people to liberate themselves and to seize power from the handful of people within the Party who are in authority and are taking the capitalist road. Only by carrying out a great mass movement like this, a mass struggle to seize power in an all-round way, is it possible thoroughly to resolve the problem of the seizure of power by the proletariat, thoroughly to resolve the problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Power of every sort controlled by the representatives of the bourgeoisie must be seized! This is the great truth of Marxism-Leninism, of Mao Tse-tung‘s thought, which the revolutionary masses have grasped through arduous struggles over the last few months.
Why was it that when the revolutionary Left, in response to the great call of Chairman Mao and from their boundless loyalty to the proletarian revolutionary cause, aimed at those in authority who were taking the capitalist road and fired the first salvos, they were stigmatized as “counter-revolutionaries” and “Rightists”?
Why was it that after the arrival of the “work teams,” the revolutionary Left was not only not emancipated, but was, on the contrary, subjected all the more to brutal suppression under white terror?
Why was it that when the broad revolutionary masses rose up to expose and criticize the bourgeois reactionary line, there occurred incidents of the masses struggling against the masses on a larger scale and even struggling by force and bloodshed; why were so many revolutionary path-breakers attacked, persecuted, expelled and suppressed? Why did there occur recently new large-scale counter-attacks by the bourgeois reactionary line and a flood of counter-revolutionary economism?
Reversals and twists and turns over the past several months and the repeated hurricanes of stormy class struggle gave the masses of revolutionary rebels profound lessons. They are seeing ever more clearly that the reason why the revolution suffered setbacks is due precisely to the fact that they did not seize in their own hands the seals of power. The handful of representatives of the bourgeoisie are vicious and dare to bully people to such an extent precisely because they still have power! Of all the ways for the revolutionary masses to take their destiny into their own hands, in the final analysis, the only way is to take power! Those who have power have everything; those who are without power have nothing. Of all the important things, the possession of power is the most important! Such being the case, the revolutionary masses, with a deep hatred for the class enemy, clench their teeth and, with steel-like determination, make up their mind to unite, form a great alliance, seize power! Seize power!! Seize power!!! All the Party power, political power and financial power usurped by the counter-revolutionary revisionists and those diehards who persistently cling to the bourgeois reactionary line must be recaptured! The proletarian revolutionary masses must take firmly into their own hands the destiny of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the destiny of the great proletarian cultural revolution and the destiny of the socialist economy! They have rightly said: “The proletarian revolutionaries, the real revolutionary Left, have their eye on seizing power, think of seizing power and act to seize power!” This is not “personal ambition,” but to seize power for the sake of the proletariat and communism and to let the great thought of Mao Tse-tung take possession of all positions!
The earth-shaking mass movement of the proletarian revolutionary rebels in forming a great alliance to struggle to seize power is a decisive and gigantic battle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It is inevitably accompanied by a concentrated outbreak of class contradictions, by a storm unprecedented in size. The actuality of this decisive and gigantic battle has opened a soul-stirring scene before our eyes.
Just look! The proletarian rebel masses, having surmounted many obstacles, have taken action urgently, grouped themselves under the great red banner of Mao Tse-tung‘s thought and rallied around them hundreds of millions of revolutionaries. They are displaying in a highly conscious way the revolutionary rebel spirit of the proletariat, dare to struggle, dare to seize power, charge and storm and put to rout all that stands against them, and they are forging ahead from victory to victory.
Just look! The handful of counter-revolutionary revisionists are scared out of their wits and hate with a mortal hatred the great alliance of the revolutionary rebels and their seizure of power from those in authority who are taking the capitalist road and from those die-hards who persistently cling to the bourgeois reactionary line, because the seizure of power is the seizure of their life source, the seizure of their last magic weapon on which they reckoned for a “settling of accounts after the autumn harvest.” They indeed become panicky, fly into a rage and are seized by fits of hysteria. But the last-ditch fight of all counter-revolutionaries helps them not at all. They are rapidly being swallowed up in the torrents of the mass movement of the revolutionary rebels‘ great alliance to struggle to seize power.
To every proletarian revolutionary this is indeed the greatest joy in life!
To carry out the struggle for the seizure of power, the proletarian revolutionary rebels must effect a great alliance. In the absence of a great alliance, the seizure of power from those in authority who are taking the capitalist road remains empty talk. In the Communist Manifesto more than a hundred years ago, Marx and Engels were the first to raise the militant slogan “Workers of all countries, unite!”, sounding the drums for the proletariat‘s first seizure of power which reduced the bourgeoisie of the old world to fear and trembling. More than forty years ago, our great leader Chairman Mao issued the great call for “a great alliance of the masses of the people,” sounding the bugle call for our country‘s New Democratic revolution. Today, in the new situation of our country‘s great cultural revolution, hundreds of millions of revolutionaries are getting mobilized and plunging into struggle at the great, new call of Chairman Mao under the great slogan of “Proletarian revolutionary rebels, form a great alliance to seize power from those in authority who are taking the capitalist road!” This foreshadows the end for the handful of people within the Party who are in authority and taking the capitalist road and for those diehards who persistently cling to the bourgeois reactionary line.
“I ask the great earth and the boundless blue
Who are the masters of all nature?”
[From Chairman Mao‘s poem Changsha—to the melody “Shen Yuan Chun”]
“We are! We are! We are!! We, the worker, peasant and soldier masses, are the indisputable masters of the new world!” Such is the clear voice of the revolutionary masses!
Revolutionary cadres and revolutionary students must integrate themselves with the workers movement and the peasant movement. They must integrate the struggle in society with that in the organization they belong to and establish an alliance with revolutionary forces outside their organizations so as to attack from both within and without to thoroughly smash the old systems of exploitation and revisionism and all bureaucratic setups. The masses of workers and peasants, revolutionary intellectuals and revolutionary cadres together should act as masters of their own affairs and establish a brand new proletarian order.
The great alliance has to be formed in the struggle for the seizure of power. The great alliance requires a clear-cut stand. It is a great alliance of revolutionary rebels, and not a hodge-podge. Eclecticism, reformism, “small group mentality” [which considers the interests of a particular group rather than the overall interest], sectarianism, departmentalism and splittism must all be defeated.
In the high tide of the great alliance of the proletarian revolutionaries to seize power from those in authority who are taking the capitalist road, a tiny number of bourgeois diehards will disguise themselves to try by hook and by crook to worm their way into the ranks of the great alliance of revolutionaries. They hypocritically fly a flag of “revolutionary rebellion” in an attempt to seize power from the proletariat. It is their practice to fabricate rumours, sow discord and dissension, transpose black and white and confuse right and wrong, incite the masses to shift the target of the struggle and direct the spearhead of attack at the revolutionaries, at the dictatorship of the proletariat and at the headquarters of the proletarian revolution. We must follow Chairman Mao‘s teachings, heighten our vigilance and keep clear-sighted so that we draw a clear-cut line between the enemy and ourselves, distinguish between right and wrong on vital questions, see through all their intrigues and schemes and give them resolute counterblows!
Such strong, unprecedented resistance from the class enemy is inevitable. The handful of people within the Party who are in authority and taking the capitalist road and the tiny number of diehards who persistently cling to the bourgeois reactionary line are colluding with all monsters and ghosts in society to knock together a counter-revolutionary alliance to oppose the great alliance of revolution. But no matter how many twists and turns and reverses we may meet, with the brilliant leadership of Chairman Mao, we, the hundreds of millions of revolutionaries armed with Mao Tse-tung‘s thought, will overcome all difficulties, expose one by one those who stir up winds of evil and direct the spearhead of their attack at the dictatorship of the proletariat and at the headquarters of the proletarian revolution, and we will expose them and pull them down. The great revolutionary alliance will eventually defeat the small counter-revolutionary alliance.
“So many deeds cry out to be done.
And always urgently;
The world rolls on.
Time presses.
Ten thousand years are too long.
Seize the day, seize the hour!”
[From Chairman Mao‘s poem Reply to Kuo Mo-jo—to the melody of “Man Chiang Hung”]
Revolutionary comrades-in-arms, let us get mobilized under the guidance of the proletarian revolutionary line represented by Chairman Mao, form a great alliance and unfold a nationwide all-round struggle to seize power from the handful of people within the Party who are in authority and taking the capitalist road and those diehards who persistently cling to the bourgeois reactionary line and triumphantly fulfil the great historic task entrusted to us by Chairman Mao.
If the enemy refuses to surrender, we will finish him off!
Proletarian revolutionaries, form a great alliance to seize power from those in authority who are taking the capitalist road!
(“Renmin Ribao” editorial, January 22.)
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